Posted
by
samzenpuson Wednesday June 04, 2008 @10:04PM
from the I-always-feel-like-somebody's-watching-me dept.

G'Quann writes "A new survey shows that data retention laws indeed do influence the behavior of citizens (at least in Germany). 11% had already abstained from using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions and 52% would not use phone or e-mail for confidential contacts.
This is the perfect argument against the standard 'I have nothing to hide' argumentation. Surveillance is not only bad because someone might discover some embarrassment. It changes people. 11% at least."

There are tons of studies showing that people act differently when they know they're being watched or recorded.
I'd say that the 11% figure is a huge understatement, 89% of users are clueless, or, most likely, most folks have been assuming a lack of privacy all along.
I'm in the 'lack of privacy from the beginning' camp.
hanzie

Germany is a place that knows what wiretaps and domestic spying is all about. Everyone's grandfather can tell them what the Nazis did to friend and foe alike [slashdot.org]. Public display of Nazi symbols is still against the law because it outrages so many. People who lived through the East German Police state [wikipedia.org] have more recent and personal reasons to fear this kind of monitoring. Domestic spying is about eliminating political opposition and the only way to save yourself from that is to run away. Eventually, even those who manage to keep out of sight by doing nothing are destroyed by the schemes of those in power. States that do this are out of control.

If you understand these things and how computers work, you have no choice but to use and advocate free software. Non free software has the ability to end freedom of press and every other right. We are well down that path, with newspapers raided [homelandstupidity.us], citizens spyed on, an unpopular war of aggression, torture and other evil things. You can have your privacy with free software and should demand it.

I understand your whole argument except the 'free software' implication. I don't see how paying for software, or getting it for free, has anything to do with one's ability to preserve privacy and political security.

Maybe you meant to say "Microsoft allows politicians to open backdoors" or "Linux programmers would not care what politicians want." But since you said neither, your vague comment leaves me wondering how 'free software' relates to 'preserving privacy'.

If you have complete control over your software, as free (as in freedom) software guarantees by definition, you can enforce your own privacy and security. If you have a solution you cannot modify, you are completely restricted to its ideas of privacy and security.

Human freedom has to extend to freedom of information and freedom of control over our own tools, including software and hardware. If we allow our corporations and governments to control our tools, they move on to controlling our media (DRM's already here) and eventually our legal freedom (DMCA raids?!)

The thing is, the vast majority of people have no way to verify that their software is secure, even if it's open source. And even the people who do have the ability aren't going to. Are you really going to read through every line of code in the Linux kernel looking for backdoors? What about the compiler you use to build it? And the same for every application you use. Even for widely used pieces of software you can't assume that someone would find a backdoor that had been inserted -- look at the recent Debian SSH key bug (yes, I know that wasn't a backdoor, but it could just as well have been). Open source isn't a guarantee of anything.

Like I just replied to the other AC, of course you have no way to verify that it's secure, but at least with the source you still have power over it. If you don't want DRM integrated into the kernel, you don't have to have it. Go ahead and remove the DRM from Vista. I'll wait right here.

the vast majority of people have no way to verify that their software is secure, even if it's open source. And even the people who do have the ability aren't going to. Are you really going to read through every line of code in the Linux kernel looking for backdoors?

Freedom means that you can do all of that and teams of people do for both cooperative and competitive reasons. All of the usual guards for non free software apply. People are watching their computers and will report suspicious communication. Then come all of the free software checks. The code gets checked upstream by the team that creates it and then downstream by many distributions that use it before finally being checked by the much larger number of users. The free software community is able to verify code from creation to desktop use and it's a fairly competitive place. For every kind of check you have in the non free world, you have more and better in the free world as well as greater competition and willingness to report wrongdoing. This makes it unlikely you will be caught by malicious code.

Yes, look at it. Luciano Bello found it. He's a Debian developer. Please don't go off about how long it took to find it. Think about that: it makes GP's point for him.

And ook at the rest of the argument. ~Are you going to read every line~? C'mon: strawmen don't get much more blatant than that. Similarly with "Open source isn't a guarantee of anything." As compared to what, please? Another strawman.

A freedom is only worth as much as what you can do because of it. Since most people lack the resources to audit source code and change anything they don't like, the only advantage open source software offers them from the perspective under discussion is that they are trusting an anonymous group of people who talk up freedom a lot rather than trusting a group of people working for a company who have commercial interests.

This most certainly does undermine the original argument [slashdot.org], because it contradicts the claims about all the things you can do just because you're using "free" software.

In short, you could make an argument that open source is a necessary condition for the personal control under discussion, but that is not the same as demonstrating that it is sufficient for the same. And realistically, you ultimately get a "who watches the watchers" problem either way, so I'm not convinced that even the necessity argument is a particularly strong one in practice.

That is not true. Even if a freedom is no particular use to you directly, you may benefit by other people exercising their freedom. I may never modify a single line of open source code, but I benefit immensely from all the people who have. Without them I wouldn't have a desktop with a powerful command line and virtual desktops.

>..the vast majority of people have no way to verify that> their software is secure..Doesn't matter. So long as we are ALLOWED to possess Free Software it keeps em honest. How can you enforce a backdoor when there are hundreds of distribution points? When anyone who wants to can replace/rewrite a major codebase at whim?

Now compare to closed commercial software. First off remember that all closed shops utterly depend on the government to grant and enforce the monopoly they depend upon for their re

First off remember that all closed shops utterly depend on the government to grant and enforce the monopoly they depend upon for their revenue.

I currently work for a non-Free software company (not as a developer though), and want to point out that as not entirely true. It depends very highly on the industry and the customer. Being an employee I could get a copy of our software at no cost or close enough that it wouldn't matter (or so I assume; worse-case scenario, I re-generate myself a temporary key once a month). However I still choose to write my own applications where I could use our pre-built tool. Cost is not the issue: it's a combination of (my general lack of) experience with the.net platform, a dislike of said platform, the software generally being overkill for what I'd be doing, and my obsession with specialized tools that do one thing really well than general tools that do a lot of stuff reasonably well.

Back on topic though, we could still sell our software even if copyright law didn't exist or if it was open source. Why? We have a support department. Not a forum, but a department. When you're selling to companies, there's tremendous value to them to be able to pick up a phone and call someone when something's not working. Consider the paid versions of MySQL, for example. I'm not at all knocking FOSS for this approach to support, but rather pointing out that if your target audience consists primarily of large businesses, the ability to get in direct contact with someone who's paid to troubleshoot or walk across the building to find the developer who wrote the problematic code is a BIG selling point.

For software that costs under a couple hundred bucks, this isn't so much of an issue. However when companies are going to be making an investment in the tens to hundreds of thousands of dollars on software, you can bet your ass that the support and maintenance of that software is very important. Don't get me wrong - we've lost deals to Drupal and Joomla probably as often as we've lost deals to our "real" competition, but more often than not those were very unqualified leads anyways.

I work in sales, so take it with a grain of salt if you will. But I'm not saying that commercial/closed-source software is better than free or open-source software (it goes both ways all the time and often is a matter of opinion), just that it's more than the existence of IP laws that keep us in business.

but to enforce DRM they are dependent on government guns! Once there is DRM everywhere backed by the shut-up power of the DMCA there's no legal way to even SAY (because it's illegal to distribute and use tools to even look!) that a piece of software has a backdoor. It only took the FCC goons about 5 minutes to realize they could use that to start locking "entertainment" down... public safety LOVES the combination that's eliminated public scanners of police frequencies.

but as long as SOME people CAN do that we're OK. Look at how the DMCA works where even the tools to look at something like De-CSS would be considered illegal. Consider the FCC really wanted to pass the broadcast flag that would REQUIRE all TV decoding software to be locked against the user for public broadcasts! That means no end Users could record the nightly news... the start of re-writing history every few years with nobody to even legally defend against it.

Do I read every line? No. Do I randomly, check submitted patches? Yes. Not all the time, not really that often, but enough that, with enough people like me, the "many eyes" system will work. Not everyone has to check everything, just a bunch of independent people have to check a bunch of things.

That's a useless argument. Having the source and having a community built around the source is already infinitely better than having neither. The very tangible result of this is that Windows Vista is covered in DRM and privacy leaks from the ground up, while you can get a wide range of modern Linux and BSD distros with neither of those problems.

Yes, and that's still much better than when much worse mistakes are made in proprietary systems. At least in the open source case the mistake *was* found, and because of the heterogeny of the open source space, it only affected "some" distributions, and the fix was released in a matter of hours. I haven't heard of a single high profile target compromised because of that error. Many Windows bugs have affected over 80% of the world's desktops at a time, and there have been *plenty* of those, not just one.

And if you want to play this game, why not bring up the case where an actual blackhat tampered with the Linux upstream CVS repository and his clever backdoor was still caught before it was even released. http://kerneltrap.org/node/1584 [kerneltrap.org] Just because a single error occured in Debian's process does not damn the entire open source world.

I expect it would be much harder to sneak something evil into a large-scale, high-profile project than some few-person svn repo on Sourceforge. Something like a Linux distro has enough eyeballs looking at the code that a backdoor would be relatively easily spotted (especially when comparing versions of a file), where with a small tool it's not unlikely for code to never get looked at again so long as it's still functioning properly.

I know that already. That's why it could have easily led to a high profile compromise. A lot of web sites can be modified just by logging in via SSH, which you'd be able to do if you hit the right key for the right user. And with a search space of that many keys, it's easier than a brute force password search.Ironically it's exactly the people who were careful about using only private keys (myself included) that were affected, and password-only users were much less affected. Of course everyone is affected t

The license does guarantee you have control over it, whether or not you have the practical means to assert the control you want. If a feature violates your privacy, you're welcome to remove it. If that would deny you some functionality, such as a protocol feature, that's your decision, and a free software license won't get in your way.It's splitting hairs at this point, but the difference between libre software and closed software is so large in this case that I am comfortable using generalisations like "co

Point being, you can never "have complete control over your software".

Don't know how to read? Ask a programmer. Don't trust one programmer? Ask more. Distrust your OS? Do a code audit. Suspicious of your compiler? Write your own. (You know, like people did back in the stone age.) Hell, you could go ahead and make your own hardware from scratch. It may take a few years/decades to do it right, but it can be done.

So yes, you can control your software. The only pre-existing system you have to rely on is the one that produced the raw materials for the

I don't see how paying for software, or getting it for free, has anything to do with one's ability to preserve privacy and political security.

Free software is not about money, as is free in "free beer". It is about freedom as is in "free speech".

With commercial software you have no legal possibility nor adequate technical tools to deeply verify if software you use has backdoors or anything else you do not want to be there inside your computer, phone, videorecorder, anything. And actually it does not matter

In open source it is at least possible to look at what the code you are using is actually doing. While it may not be practical for most, the possibility is still there so that if a major problem is found someone can go back and find the culprit.

How is this kind of stuff news, really? We act differently depending on whether we're in front of a few friends, our family, our employers, or a large audience. Things you would never put in a letter you'll say over a beer, because you can always deny it later- there's no proof. People do things in Vegas they would never do in their home towns. And so on, and so on. We're social animals, we act according to the social context.

I believe surveillance, when universal, and when the feeds are available to all, can be an extremely good thing. This essentially emulates small town life, but with the benefit that you have so many people out there, that odds are excellent that you're going to find lots of other people engaging in your behavior, and even better, people will see the context in which your behavior is marinating.I think this creates a glass house society where you quickly realize that everyone is human, can much more easily

There are lots of other benefits of doing this, from law enforcement (in a non-Orwellian way) automation, to the relaxation of the executive branch

And when all your personal details are available to anyone, anyone can steal your identity. Or if you make something unharmful, but seen in society as bad (not wearing burka for example) there can be something like mob justice [techdirt.com] but with half of some country angry.

exactly, you'd thing Germany of all places has learned it's lesson TWICE in the last 100 years that the government is the worst offender at spying on it's citizens.... I guess this generation doesn't think it will happen to THEM or something.

Neah, it is just the 11% that have an account in Lichtenshtein or a villa on Majorca in the name of their great grand aunt.After the Euro changeover the German Tax office had a large contingent of their officers seconded to the Balearics and Canaries for a couple of years for a reason. Based on the submitted tax returns the burgers were poor as church mice. At the same time the construction industry in Spain was undergoing a multibillion euro boom with German money appearing out of nowhere. Most of it is st

Now before I start IANAA (I Am Not An Anthropologist) but I did read a bit on the topic at one point, to try to understand how people work, so to speak.

One thing that stuck in my head was that there's a relatively large disconnect between what people say in surveys and what they actually do. What people as in surveys isn't as much deliberately lying, or even being aware that they lie, but basically describing an ideal "self" that they'd like to be or were taught to be. They describe someone who's more socially acceptable. E.g.,

- A (formerly) hunter-gatherer tribe had traditionally a martial culture glorifying brave hunters and warriors. So in a survey almost all males described themselves as hunters and warriors. The problem? They had actually gradually switched to agriculture some time ago. Most of them didn't even have a weapon, and hadn't hunted or fought in their life.

- A community prided themselves in helping each other and doing stuff together and things like that. So in a survey they said that, yeah, verily, they work the fields together and help each other build a barn, etc. Except in practice the last time either actually happened was some half a century ago.

- At one point where meat prices went up, they asked people whether they eat more or less meat. Most said, basically, "screw this, I'll eat less of that until the prices come down. That'll show 'em." Except they also looked at sales data, and actually rummaged through that town's garbage to see what packaging people throw away. Meat consumption had actually gone _up_.

It turns out that you might be better off observing them, whenever possible, than asking people to describe themselves.

What I'm getting at here is, basically, yes, the same applies to "I have nothing to hide" declarations in survey. If people are under the impression that a nice person wouldn't do stuff they need to hide from their neighbours, they'll adjust their perceptions of themselves to think they are (closer to) that ideal nice person.

Additionally, I'd say that a lot of such behaviour changing is probably subconscious anyway. Probably the 89% just didn't spend much time analyzing and second guessing their own actions and conversations, nor asked themselves "exactly why am I not calling my old pal Mohammed Abd Jihad any more?" They just don't, and don't spend time navel-gazing and wondering about it.

For some probably cognitive dissonance kicked in a long time ago, and manufactured an acceptable model and an explanation anyway.

The correct answer is "They expand the data retention practices, and they make sure their subjects know about it".

The unmonitored Internet was a way to make sure that any two people, anywhere on the planet, could exchange ideas (and spam, and political flamewars on message boards, and even LOLcats) with each other.

Users of the monitored Internet voluntarily restrict themselves to "safe" (government-approvable) media, and their acquaintances, friendships, and relationships to pools of "safe" (government-approvable) people.

It's been said that "The Internet interprets censorship as damage and routes around it".

That's not quite true. The unspoken assumption in the early '90s was that "censorship" meant "externally-imposed" censorship. Indeed, the Internet interprets externally-mandated censorship as damage and routes around it, but the Internet has no defense against self-censorship. Make the user scared to search for information about topic XYZ, and you've effectively censored the Internet where topic XYZ is concerned.

Pretty clever, and all it took to scare an entire planet into self-censorship was a few press releases and carefully-selected arrests and/or disappearances.

No, it will not help. Not in the US anyway, where the government at first argues that torture means pain at least as bad as losing a limb or vital organ, and then defines it as some undetermined subset of those things which we do not do. That kind of thinking certainly lets you justify modifying people's behavior.
Some of the people who are in charge of the "War on Terror" in the US would not care, and the rest would convince themselves that any changes it might bring were a good thing anyway.
Rereading

That means 11% of the people were going to do something morally wrong and thought twice about getting caught. That proves survaillence is doing it's part to curtail the unwashed masses of wickedness on the interwebitubes. When more like 50% start censoring themselves then we'll know that people take their freedom of speech seriously and make sure only edifying things are spoken.

Exactly. I say that there should be a law that anyone who changes their behavior under surveillance should be hanged, no exceptions. As its has been proven by pete-classic that they are guilty. I would go further to say that govt should install CCTVs in everyone's bedroom

well, the argument I use against 'I have nothing to hide' is 'so when do I come to your house and install a webcam in your bedroom?' It's shut quite a few mouthes. Privacy is not just about moral or immoral behavior. Privacy just is.

well, the argument I use against 'I have nothing to hide' is 'so when do I come to your house and install a webcam in your bedroom?'

Bedroom is good. Toilet is even better. If they have no modesty, ask them to hand over the account numbers and passwords to their bank accounts. Also ask for their full medical history. If that doesn't shut them up, ask for the same for their entire extended family.

if the government really had that much of an interest in me or that much intent against me there pretty much ain't but jack and shit I can do about it

True, but the government does not yet have the ability to do it on a massive scale without significant investment. Which is to say we should try to raise the bar as high as possible for governmental spying - so high that it will only be used for legitimate, isolated cases, as opposed to the broad, scary data-mining applications we see today.

Even if it is legal for me as a person to learn your secrets, I guess it would be still illegal to abuse them and get your money without your permission. So if I do so, you can fight me. And it would quite fair fight, man against man, some people on my side, some (I believe more) on yours, plus state justice will be helping you.

But if state takes your money, they can "rule" and "redefine" the nature of t

The bottom line is that I know that the government does (or could) know my bank account information, my medical history, my cell phone calls, etc etc.

The problem is you're seeing "government" is a single abstract entity. But government is made up of all those
petty civil servants at the local council, policemen, judges and so on. Would you be happy to have a file
with full details of your children sent to every policeman in your city? Presumably only if policemen
were incorruptible, absolutely trusted, and none of them were themselves abusers. If you believe that
about the police, well...

So this is why it's not a question about should "the government" have access to this data.
It's about should all these random people have access to it? Is it really necessary for
anyone but one person (my family doctor alone) to have access to my medical history? Or should
that be shared with every single snooper at the local council? Should I give the firemen plans
to my house, when it's possible that one of them has a sideline in burglary?

A perfect counter? That statement is so loaded, if you drop it someone could get hurt. How about something like: 'You have nothing to hide, eh? Great. Let me look through your purse/wallet right now.' Of course, they refuse. 'Why not? Do you have something to hide?'

People that say "I've nothing to hide" have never worked in IT. Can't tell you the number of times I've had to deal with screwups, usually because some data entry person mis-typed a social security number, or entered the same person twice, or thought 2 john smiths were the same person... (Had one fun one.. Firstname, lastname, birthday, address, all the same. Gender and SocialSec number were different. They were married;)

Is it no surprise that, as people learn, government and business are monitoring and tracking them they modify their behavior?

It's working. People are afraid to communicate, talk only in closets, and while we claim "free speech" we dare not exercise it because of the terrible consequences of daring to say something unpopular, "anti-government," or "anti-corporation."

We now all live in soviet union where corporate/government kgb punishes you for offenses of opinion.

Sure, criminal behaviour has changed. Instead of using regular cell phones, professional bad guys now use nice untraceable prepaid cell phones (and discard them regularly). So, the data retention has indeed brought on a change - but the change makes the data retention useless.

What the data retention does do, is to trip up the only-vaguely-criminal acts of the amateur. For instance, it is now much easier to track down the affairs of an unfaithful spouse, and to win a nice fat divorce settlement. Somehow I doubt that was the original aim of the data retention.

Behavior changes when people are observed? Psychologists have known this for years. It's called the Hawthorne effect [wikipedia.org], and it's something you always have to watch for when studying behavior.

What first came to my mind was the chilling effect.It doesn't matter if anyone is actually watching, just the threat of observation/data retention is enough.

Kinda like red-light cameras.Some cities have realized that putting up the sign is as effective as installing a working camera.

Depends on what their goal is. If their goal is to reduce the frequency of people running red lights, you're absolutely right. But frequently the goal of these cities is to increase revenue, in which case they want to have real cameras which are as unobtrusive as possible. Some cities have even been caught fiddling with the timing of their lights to cause more violations.

Now consider that theory as applied to data retention and surveillance. I'll wait here while you work through the implications.

Yup, that's for example this Airbus spying by americans I mentioned in my other post [slashdot.org].

If you are able to sufficiently distance yourself from your government in terms of feelings and day to day routine so as to allow yourself a chance to clearly think about stuff, than it's usually quite funny to decompose official arguments for something the government is doing and finding a real motive.

These 11% (would probably be higher if more people actually knew what their governments could do) are proof that paranoid schizophrenia doesn't exist. It's not paranoia when people really are watching your every move, reading your email, and listening to your phone conversations. Paranoid schizophrenics, rejoice! You're just schizophrenic now!

These 11% (would probably be higher if more people actually knew what their governments could do) are proof that paranoid schizophrenia doesn't exist. It's not paranoia when people really are watching your every move, reading your email, and listening to your phone conversations.

I actually trust my government for the most part. (It's not the US government, incidentally.) Having said this there's no way in hell that I support legislation that gives the government and its agencies power to snoop more on its citizens, at least without some very carefully designed procedures in place such as requiring warrants from independent judges, etc.

The whole nothing-to-hide argument seems thin. Personally I don't have anything serious to hide that I'm aware of, and I doubt I ever will. That said, I also have no reason to believe that I'll trust the government and its agencies in the future.

Simply trusting agencies not to abuse their power isn't good enough, because sooner or later someone will always come along who's happy to abuse their position and take advantage of it. (Communism's great until the corrupt people get to the top and then use that influence to change the rules and keep themselves there and push their own agenda.) By the same token, I have no reason to believe that if extra power is given to police and similar agencies to snoop on me and others, that they won't be full of people ready to abuse that ability in 10 or 15 years time.

Having a good and reliable government is as much about good design of its rules and keeping them firmly in place as it is about trusting the people who are in it. Sooner or later bad people will come along, but a good structure will keep the influence of those people to a minimum.

I guess you are from some post-socialistic country. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I'm from Slovakia. Former member of Czechoslovakia. Formed socialistic republic under the rule of Communist parties (Czech, Slovak and Russian ones, maybe more:).

What I find quite disturbing, but also quite logical, is that we... of former Soviet/communist/... block got rid of that totalitarian system only to find out that almost all of our shiny examples of democracy (USA, France,...) are heading in a direction we're trying to get away from.

And we try to talk to those people, having some fresh memories from planned economy, one party rules them all, secret police and domestic spying, free speech so long as you do not say bad things about the party, lack of freedoms and thus diminishing amount of responsibility among people and thus their increased dependance on someone (preferably strong nany state), Lenin and Soviet union forever, etc.

So bother them and only if they pose a problem. People can worry about the slightest things getting out, not because it's illegal, sometimes not even because it's damaging to one's reputation, maybe it's just because no one has any right to know.So yes, if you suspect me of being the leader of some crime ring and have more than a hunch, then by all means, track my every word and move. Go ahead and make my house one big mic if you want. If you want to find potential criminals, then piss off and take the time

Because anything and everything my doctor writes down is reviewable by some nitwit risk analysis agent who's performing an analysis of my background and medical history that was originally written to standards associated with middle class, heterosexual, white christian males.

not poor minorities from the ghetto. and certainly not poor fags.

it's no wonder gov't has no respect for private citizens when the folks that are hired have to open up their life history and medical record and thus _must_ have nothing to hide or be very good at hiding it.

who's performing an analysis of my background and medical history that was originally written to standards associated with middle class, heterosexual, white christian males.

Ha. Are you still stuck in the 1950's?I guess you're right that the standards were originally written for heterosexual, white males... But the only reason those standards stuck around for so long is an artifact of Militaries the world over keeping extensive & detailed medical histories of their white, heterosexual soldiers.

Please forward me copies of everything you've ever written and everything you've ever received, and recordings of all your phone conversations. Plus all your travel records and every financial transaction.

If you won't do it for me, then please just pick anyone. Any ten or a hundred people, actually. Be sure to select only people who have appointed themselves your political enemies; who the hell else would ever bother looking?

"This is the perfect argument against the standard 'I have nothing to hide' argumentation. Surveillance is not only bad because someone might discover some embarrassment. It changes people. 11% at least."

What a silly interpretation of simple data.

Could it be that 11% have something to hide?

Taking a random review of the people I know well, I'd say this is understating it.

In light of the people deciding that people don't have anything to hide, I ask that everyone answer the following questionnaire:

1) What is your bank account PIN number?2) What is your annual salary?3) What is your Significant Other's phone number?4) What are your passwords to various email and web accounts?5) What is the length of your penis?

This is the perfect argument against the standard 'I have nothing to hide' argumentation.

Why doesn't anybody see through the "nothing to hide" rhetoric? We all have something to hide - it's just not something that is necessarily criminal. It's called "privacy" - I, for example, wouldn't like somebody to watch me while I take a dump. I wouldn't want a stranger to hear certain of the things I say to my wife. I might have a mistress ("I neither confirm nor deny..."), and I certainly wouldn't want that to become general knowledge - but it isn't illegal in most countries.

E-mail and phone calls are just conversations that happen to occur using electronic means. Requiring them to be logged is no more reasonable than it is to require that every face-to-face conversation a person has also be logged. (It's simply easier to log the electronic conversations.)

This is why I think that data retention laws are ridiculous in most cases. The main accomplishment of such laws is to make email and phone calls much less useful.

Those 11% of people should be simply shot dead. They're terrorists anyway so why risking wasting resources for example on court cases where some of them try to sue the state for the surveliance using stupid arguments like free speech, privacy and so on.

Of course I'm joking.

Of course some people did take measures. There were cases IIRC where americans were spying on Airbus in order to give Boeing some advantage in contracts where they were bidding against each other. (surely they have reason for spying,

According to the Slashdot story...> "A new survey shows that data retention laws indeed do influence the> behavior of citizens (at least in Germany). 11% had already abstained from> using phone, cell phone or e-mail in certain occasions and 52% > would not> use phone or e-mail for confidential contacts.

I know you didn't really mean that, but the misconception will rise and must be addressed.

First, No surveilence should exist that changes people's behavior. That is a definition of tyrany.Second, if a drug dealer did modify his communications, it was in the direction of using a more secure way to send information.

Politicians are explicitly taken out of the surveillance loop. You may snoop on confessions in church, you may wiretap journalists, but don't you DARE listen to a MP discussing his payment with a lobbyist.

Of course we all have something to hide. In a litigious society, nearly everyone has broken a law. When was the last time you ran a red light? Jaywalked? Downloaded a movie? Used drugs?
More pointedly, is it really the government's business if someone is cheating on their spouse?
The danger isn't that the government will find out about these things and prosecute everyone responsible for them. The danger is that you make an enemy in a position of power, and that person decides to hang you out to dry for